Friendship and the Moral Life

Paul J. Wadell C.P.

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1990
• Print ISBN: 9780268009748, 9780268009731
• eBook ISBN: 9780268096793
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Friendship and the Moral Life is not simply a theoretical argument about how moral theology might be done if it took friendship more seriously. Rather, the book exhibits how without friendship, our lives are morally not worth living. The book begins with a consideration of why a new model of the moral life is needed. Wadell then examines the ethics of Aristotle, who viewed the moral life as based on a specific understanding of the purpose of being human, with friendship being an important factor in enabling people to acquire virtues necessary for achieving this purpose. Through the thought of Augustine, Aelred of Reivaulx, and Karl Barth, the question is raised whether friendship is at odds with Christian love or whether their relation depends on one's narrative account of friendship. Thomas Aquinas' understanding of charity as friendship with God is examined to clarify this relationship.

By locating friendship within the story of God's redemption through Christ, Wadell helps us see why friendship properly understood is integral to the Christian life and not at odds with it. Such a friendship draws us to love all others who seek God and teaches us not to restrict our concern to a special few in preferential love. The book closes by investigating how friendship as a model for the moral life might work in everyday life.

1. Friendship and the Moral Life:

Why a New Model for Morality Is Needed

I. An Autobiographical Beginning

In the fall of 1965 two hundred of us embarked on an adventure from which we never fully recovered. We left our homes in Saint Louis, Chicago, Detroit, California, Louisville—others from places remembered only by them—and journeyed to a little town in eastern Missouri called Warrenton, to a high school seminary called Mother of Good Counsel, to a religious community called the Passionists, to a large rambling pink stucco building that never quite fit the landscape but for the next four years would be our home.

Life was different, people were happy—that is the first thing we noticed about Warrenton and what we always remember. What made it different and its memory lasting was what the school was trying to achieve. At Warrenton, they were not just trying to teach us, they were also trying to change us, to form and shape us, to take us as we were, all raw, unfinished youth, and make us something more. Warrenton was an experiment, a dream perhaps, born from the conviction that life has a purpose and our happiness is achieving it. There was the deep belief that all of us have to become more than we already are, we have to change, we have to become as good as we possibly can. It is never enough just to be ourselves, we have to grow, to be transfigured from sinners into friends of God. Warrenton was not just a school, it was a way of life, a vision that made the everyday a grammar for our hopes, and because we shared the same hopes we were able to become good friends.

The most remarkable fact about Warrenton was that all of us who came there strangers left there friends. On a Saturday in May 1969, lives so unexpectedly brought together were just as unexpectedly torn apart. We left to different futures—most to marriage, a few to religious life and priesthood, some to futures never revealed to the rest of us—but we left as friends. Even though we did not understand then what those friendships meant to us, nor how deeply and poignantly we had touched each other’s lives, it is a tribute to those friendships that so many years later when we hear the word “friend” it is each other we remember.

Warrenton was a school of friendship. That was its most remarkable achievement, its enduring legacy. But it was not its explicit purpose. We went there not to be friends but to discover if we ought to be Passionists. Scattered all across the country, people of different backgrounds, talents, personalities and temperaments did something very odd in 1965: In answer to an inkling, we left our homes, journeyed to the rural Missouri countryside (an unlikely place to augur the future), and for the next four years pledged to see life with people we had never met. It was a strange scenario, two hundred boys on the threshold of adolescence, each a parable of all the turns a life can take, inducted into a world established to fathom a promise. It was not a world that would make sense to most, all its strange practices, its baffling rules, but it was a world that could make a single possibility real, and in whatever measure we gave ourselves to that we found a memory from which hope continues to be born.

A few days before Christmas 1968 several of us gathered for Eucharist. It was evening, it was cold, it was peaceful. We stood in a circle around a small table which served as the altar, our faces shadowy, illumined only by the soft glow of Christmas lights scattered throughout the room. Something happened during that Eucharist; we found another reason for giving thanks. As we stood there and looked at one another we realized, perhaps for the first time, that we were indebted. We realized how much we had shaped and formed one another through an odyssey of four years, and, almost to our surprise, how close we had become, how fused our lives had grown. In that Eucharist we realized here were people we loved. It was a revelation to realize the intimacy that lived among us. Its discovery was almost a shock, because we had not set forth four years before to become friends, we had set forth to explore an intuition, to discern a grace, and now we faced an ending that took us by surprise, for though very few of us ended up Passionists, all of us ended up friends. That evening in Eucharist we encircled another offer of friendship. We closed in on a God we can hold in our hands, and as we picked that God up, placed Him in our mouths, and prayed that He would enter our hearts, we sensed for an instant why people we might never see again were people we would never forget. As God melted away in us, a memory formed within.

It is always that way with friendships; we do not aim for them directly, we discover them. Friendships are not sought, they emerge. They take shape among people of shared purpose, they grow from the soil of similar interests and concerns. Warrenton was a school of friendship not because it sought to make us friends, but because it presented us with a purpose that made friendship possible. The intimacy we felt that night in Eucharist, and the transition from strangeness to kinship it marked, would never have occurred if we had not assented to a way of life designed to uncover whether that promise was ours. One of the mysteries of Warrenton was that for most of us it was not, one of the graces of Warrenton was that the discipline required for that discovery blessed us with an intimacy that so many years later still feels amazingly fresh.

Warrenton presented us with an adventure worthy of ourselves. To become part of that adventure, to say yes to a story that from without looked so very odd, such a strange way to navigate adolescence, was from within the grandest of joys, for it taught us that our happiness lay not in the unimpeded extolling of our freedom, but in the mutual, communal submission of our lives to a purpose. In short, we were friends not because we first liked each other, but because together we pursued a way of life which formed us in the very things we came to discover we loved. It was this intuitive, seldom articulated, consensus on what we took to be the project and purpose of our life that made us such good friends and allowed our differences to contribute to a unity we otherwise never would have found. Those friendships formed twenty years ago are amazingly resilient, not because there was anything particularly special about the participants, but because there was something noble about the adventure.

Books on the moral life do not usually begin with musings from one’s adolescence; however, those musings embody an argument about another, hopefully compelling, way to consider the moral life. Warrenton was not just a school, it was a moral argument. It was an experiment in a very specific understanding of how we ought to live, and to consider it now is not to wax nostalgic on the merits of an era that will never be retrieved, but to suggest such an understanding of life has to be recovered if we are to fathom and appreciate what we mean when we describe our life as moral. Too often we narrow the focus of morality to decisions we occasionally make or problems that periodically confront us; however, the scope of morality is much grander and more dramatic than that. Morality is the arena in which persons are made or broken, in which lives succeed or are wasted. What this language suggests is that being human is a matter of doing something definitive. To be human is to have a purpose to fulfill, a goal into which we must grow, and we cannot be indifferent to this purpose, for to neglect it is to fail as a human being.

The genius of Warrenton is that it recognized morality as a question of making a single possibility real. This way of life was exactly what was required for being transformed into a person whose life gave glory to God. Warrenton was an argument which said to be human was to have a story to live and the task of our lifetime is to live so that we not only bring that story to completion, but come to embody the fullness the story represents. In Christian language, to be human is to grow to our fullness in Christ, to make good on the singular possibility of becoming as much like God as we possibly can. Such a possibility is not one option among others in the human adventure, it is its very soul. And the Christian life is precisely the discipline—the collection of practices and activities and habits—which enables the realization of this single possibility.

What Warrenton also represented as an argument for the moral life is not only that when we pursue these possibilities we discover friendships with others who share them, but that we need friends to realize these possibilities at all. Friendships come to be through goals that are shared, through common interests and concerns, but those very goals that entice us come to be only through the friendships they create. Morality involves the pursuit and achievement of some good, but that pursuit and achievement requires friendship, the ongoing presence of another who not only shares that good, but in relationship with whom the good can be received. Morality is the pursuit of a good capable of making us whole, but morality is possible only because there are others, and that is one reason friendship is so delightful, it puts goodness within our reach.

Thus, friendship is not just a good for the moral life, it is indispensable; there simply is no other way to come in touch with the goods that make us whole than through relationships with those who share them. That is why we can say friendship is the crucible of moral development, the center of moral formation. One reason we have friends is that there is a good we share with them, but the reason friendships grow and become such a delight is that we cannot be good without them, indeed, we cannot be at all. On this account, it shall not be surprising that we can speak of marriage as a kind of friendship, or of religious life as a community of friends, or even of the church as all those joined through friendship in Christ.

On a Saturday early in March when the first touches of a luscious Missouri spring could be felt in the air, a classmate walked me out the front gate of the seminary down Highway M into Warrenton. Our destination was the IGA Food-store. My friend took out a quarter, plopped it into a machine, and pulled out a bottle of Virginia Dare Creme Soda. We went outside, sat down on the curb, and in the perfect sunlight of that Saturday watched the cars roll by. We sat for a long time, saying little. We watched the procession of pickup trucks and tractors, but we were thinking of something else. In less than three months our adventure would be over, we would be pulled apart to futures we could only dimly see, and this frightened us. But we were also thinking about how over the stretch of four years two very different characters, one from Saint Louis, the other from Louisville, had each become the other’s gift, teasing out possibilities neither could have realized alone. We were thinking of the good times we had shared, of the crazy pranks we plotted, but more than anything we were feeling grateful, indebted, unusually appreciative of one without whom we could not have been ourselves. We sat there for a long time because it was a moment we did not want to pass. We wanted to savor it, to offer it up in some kind of thanksgiving, for near the end of our shared adventure we had come to see we were different than we had been when the adventure began. We had changed, we had grown, and even though we would soon be walking into a future we could hardly predict, we had that afternoon, over a bottle of Virginia Dare Creme Soda, found a memory strong enough to guide us in hope.

The moral life is often such retrospective activity because sooner or later we try to understand what has made us who we are. This leads us to certain people. We remember them, we cherish them, we are grateful to them because we realize we could not have been ourselves without them. We call these people friends, whether they be our parents, our sisters and brothers, childhood companions, or even strangers whose moment of kindness came at an hour of need. When we think of the moral life, it is not surprising we think of them. They taught us the good. They formed us. Through their love they chiseled in us qualities we could not have reached alone. When we think of the moral life, we do not remember only the decisions we sometimes had to make, even the problems that may have beset us, we also remember our friends and the life that was shared between us. There seemed to be nothing better than to be with them, that somehow being with them was being ourself, that somehow who we were was exactly the friendships that meant so much to us. When we think of the moral life we remember these friendships because intuitively we sense it is whatever happened in them that helped us grow good. In so many respects, morality is what happens between friends. It is not the whole of the moral life, but there can be no moral life without it.

Friendship is an appealing model for the moral life, but why? Perhaps because it honors our experience. Few of us have gone through high school seminaries, but all of us have been friends. So much of our life is a history of our friendships. Still, we are not accustomed to think of the moral life as friendship—we are not even accustomed to think about friendship as moral. But maybe we should. If so much of who we are is the handiwork of our friends, and if the good in which we need to be transfigured is one we do not grasp for but receive in relationships with others, then we need to give careful attention to how friendships figure in the moral life.

The moral life is the formation of people in the good in relationships with people who are good. This is what it means to speak of the moral life as friendship. And even though it may strike us as a novel idea, it is one with a venerable, if forgotten, heritage. Both Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas described the moral life in terms of friendship. Like all great moralists, Aristotle and Aquinas struggled to understand how we are to make our lives as a whole. What ought we to do with ourselves? How do we end up with a life that is both happy and good? What must become of us, how must we live, act, and behave, if our life at its end is not to be judged a failure? They answered this question in different ways, but both answered it through friendship. They understood morality to be the task of becoming a certain kind of person, of growth according to a good, but they spoke of this in the language of friendship because they suspected it was in the context of friendship that the virtues which make us whole would be learned.

The argument of this book is the same. The moral life involves the transformation of the self according to a good which represents human fullness, but that transformation occurs in the embrace of relationships with others who share our love. Before we consider what friendship means for the moral life, we need to examine what our sense of morality may be now. What are some characteristics of contemporary morality? What is our sense of it? As we look across our moral landscape, what do we see? How we answer these questions may help us appreciate the rationale for friendship as a model for the moral life; indeed, it may be that the inadequacy of our sense of the moral life is what makes the notion of friendship so enticing.

II. Why a New Model for the Moral Life Is Needed

One day, a few weeks before I began teaching my first class, I was down in the lobby of the school fetching my mail. A young man standing nearby told me he was registered for my introductory course in ethics to begin that spring. When you first begin teaching you are not sure if anyone is going to take your class, so this bit of news was welcome. I responded that I was happy to hear this and looked forward to having him in class. Then, without a second’s hesitation, the student looked at me and said, “Well, I hate ethics.”

I did not know whether to admire him for his courage or be nonplussed by his nerve, but I remember that little incident often for I suspect he captures how many of us feel about morality. We may not go so far as to say we “hate ethics,” but the thought of contemporary morality likely leaves us uneasy. Consider how we feel when moral topics are introduced. We grow anxious, we have a sense that these discussions will drag on, resolving nothing, leaving people angry and divided. We remember similar moments when we walked away weary but not enlightened, not just because the conversation seemed interminable, but because it left us feeling isolated in the company of our own principles and values. We grow uneasy when people start to talk about ethics, not because ethical discussions are always complex, but because they are so often divisive, sad reminders of how far apart we are on things we consider important.

Moral discussion distresses us because it often confirms what we have come to suspect but hate to acknowledge: a loss of confidence in morality’s point and purpose. What unsettles us is that something which ought to help us see more clearly the point and purpose of our life is in disarray. And it is not just the fact of disagreement that concerns us, for conflict has always been part of morality, but that disagreement prevails. Instead of sharpening our awareness of what the good life demands, it reminds us that the notion of the good life has been forgotten.¹

Ambivalence may best describe our feelings towards morality. On the one hand, we say, and we intuitively sense, that ethics has to do with the deepest values and concerns of our life. It has to do with what we love and cherish, with our dreams and our hopes, with all those things to which we are devoted. Intuitively we know that ethics is not primarily a matter of rules and principles, of duties and obligations, of laws pushed down on us from without, for none of these is intelligible apart from the goods we cannot afford to lose; rather, it is a scrutiny of all those things to which we must learn to be devoted if we are to find peace. Morality, we sense, is not something apart from us, it is the most personal thing about us. It is an attempt to understand what we should do with the precious lifetime we have been given.

How must our life be shaped? What must become of us if we are to be both happy and good? That question unveils the substance of morality for it takes our life as a whole and focuses on morality’s preeminent concern: How ought we to live? In his book, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams notes that this is the question with which Socrates began, and it is “the best place for moral philosophy to start.”² The value of this question is that it extends the vista of morality beyond the everyday, it enlarges the vision of our concerns beyond the immediate into the future. As Williams puts it, Socrates’ question stretches our perspective of the moral life because it does not ask ‘what shall I do,’ but ‘how shall I live.’ “This is one way in which Socrates’ question goes beyond the everyday,” he says. “Another is that it is not immediate; it is not about what I should do now, or next. It is about a manner of life. The Greeks themselves were much impressed by the idea that such a question must, consequently, be about a whole life and that a good way of living had to issue in what, at its end, would be seen to have been a good life.”³

The Second Vatican Council took the same approach. It is often noted that the Council said little explicitly about Catholic moral theology, but what it did say was important. In Optatan Totius, the Decree on the Training of Priests, the Council exhorted Catholic moral theologians to renew moral theology by focusing it on Christ and our vocation in Christ as the principle and center of the Catholic moral life. “Special care,” the Council said, “should be given to the perfecting of moral theology. Its scientific presentation should draw more fully on the teaching of holy Scripture and should throw light upon the exalted vocation of the faithful in Christ and their obligation to bring forth fruit in charity for the life of the world.”⁴

That is Socrates’ question in a new key. The Council poses the question of how we should take our life as a whole. What must happen in the course of our lifetime if that life is not to be judged a failure? And from the perspective of Christian faith they answer we must grow to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Friendship and the Moral Life: Why a New Model for Morality Is Needed
• 2. A Look at Aristotle’s Ethics: A Search for the Center That Did Not Hold
• 3. Aristotle on Friendship: What It Means for the Moral Life
• 4. Friendship as Preferential Love: Can It Be Justified?
• 5. The Christian Life as Friendship with God: What Aquinas Means by Charity
• 6. Friendship and Everyday Life: Discovering the Source of Our Moral Deliverance
• Notes
• Index